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Jason Collett returns to joyful form on Song and Dance Man

Jason Collett had to win a lengthy wrestling match with his inner pessimist to get his latest album, Song and Dance Man, happening.

The four years between his last LP, Reckon, and Song and Dance Man — due in record shops this Friday — marks the longest gap between solo releases yet in the Toronto singer/songwriter’s prolific, post-millennial recording career.

Not because Collett suddenly ran out of songs to write or anything, but more because the precarious status of the pop album as an artistic and commercial commodity left him stricken with “ambivalence about even reengaging” with the music industry and, occasionally, wondering why the hell he kept bothering to write songs at all.

“So I was just procrastinating, I suppose,” says Collett over a pint on Bloor St. “And writing a lot, just adding to the pile. I wasn’t sure what I had. You get lost when you start writing too many songs.”

Fate would eventually intervene to crack the whip, however — first in the form of a deadline imposed by his longtime label, Arts & Crafts, and then in the form of old friend and bandmate Afie Jurvanen of Bahamas, whose schedule finally cleared long enough for him and Collett to make the record they’d been talking about making together for “a couple of years.”

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It was just the shot in the arm Collett needed. With Jurvanen acting as producer and bassist, Song and Dance Man came together in a flash of joyful spontaneity that audibly energized the finished product, recorded during a run of 9-to-5 sessions (“dad hours”) at drummer Don Kerr’s Rooster Studio last spring.

Jason Collett plays guitar as little as possible on his new album, allowing his talented collaborators find the right sound for his songs. (Isis Essery)

A brisk 13 songs in 37 minutes, it’s one of Collett’s most lighthearted and instantly likeable records, one that lends an undercurrent of lean, limber and Bahamas-esque grooviness (“It smells like Afie,” he laughs) to his sardonic wordplay and ear for easy classic-rock melodies.

“The moment I started recording, it reminded me of how much I really love doing this. It got me out of my head and out of my overthinking of how f---ing awful the economics are for our industry,” he says, describing the sessions as “arbitrary” and conducted with a minimum of pre-planning.

The one thing Collett was intent on doing was playing guitar as little as possible on the record. That role was turned over to “secret weapon” Christine Bougie, lately of the Bahamas touring band, freeing Collett up to concentrate on simply singing in a way he hadn’t done before.

“I’ve noticed, over the years — especially when the other musicians in the room haven’t heard the songs before — that when you’re playing, you play the way that you wrote it and then everybody has to adapt to you,” he says.

“So if I just played the song so that they got an idea of what the song was and then I stopped playing and then they took over, they’d go off on their own thing and then I’d have to follow. That I really enjoyed doing. It was really freeing, because then I kind of became a player in a roundabout way because I’m following them as opposed to them following me.”

Jurvanen, of course, used to play in Collett’s old backing band, Paso Mino, which would go on to become Zeus. Now, to further the year of joyful reunions, Collett is recruiting Zeus to back him on a cross-Canada tour to kick off at the Mod Club on March 9.

It’s the first time the old gang has toured together since 2010’s Bonfire Ball tour with, yes, Bahamas, and Collett is pleased to see two circles closing simultaneously a decade after they all started collaborating musically. For reasons practical as well as personal.

He laughs. “I just really wasn’t looking forward to putting a band together for this one.”

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